Joby Aviation gets first passenger electric VTOL testing certification from FAA

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Joby Aviation, Inc. (NYSE:JOBY), a company developing all-electric aircraft for commercial passenger service, today announced it has received a Special Airworthiness Certificate for the first aircraft built at its Pilot Production Line in Marina, California. Issued by the Federal Aviation Administration, the certificate allows Joby to begin flight testing of its first production prototype.

The aircraft is expected to become the first ever eVTOL aircraft to be delivered to a customer when it moves to Edwards Air Force Base in 2024 to be operated by Joby as part of the Company’s Agility Prime contract with the U.S. Air Force, worth up to $131 million.

[…]

Joby has been flying full size aircraft since 2017 and its pre-production prototype aircraft have flown more than 30,000 miles since 2019. Today’s production prototype builds on that experience and marks another important step toward achieving FAA certification and production at scale.

[…]

Joby plans to begin commercial passenger operations in 2025 and recently partnered with Delta Air Lines to deliver seamless, emissions-free travel for Delta customers traveling to and from airports.

[…]

The aircraft will now undergo initial flight testing before being delivered to Edwards Air Force Base, California, where it will be used to demonstrate a range of potential logistics use cases.

Source: Joby Marks Production Launch, Receives Permit to Fly First Aircraft Built on Production Line | Joby

Google Says It’ll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

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Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot.

“Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public,” the new Google policy says. “For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.”

Fortunately for history fans, Google maintains a history of changes to its terms of service. The new language amends an existing policy, spelling out new ways your online musings might be used for the tech giant’s AI tools work.

[…]

This is an unusual clause for a privacy policy. Typically, these policies describe ways that a business uses the information that you post on the company’s own services. Here, it seems Google reserves the right to harvest and harness data posted on any part of the public web, as if the whole internet is the company’s own AI playground. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[…]

Source: Google Says It’ll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

The rest of the article goes into Gizomodo’s luddite War Against AI ™ luddite language, unfortunately, because it misses the point that basically this is nothing much new – Google has been able to use any information you type into any of their products for pretty much any purpose (eg advertising, email scanning, etc) for decades (which is why I don’t use Chrome). However it is something that most people simply don’t realise.

Valve All But Bans AI-Generated Content from Steam Games

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Game developers looking to distribute their playable creations via Valve’s popular Steam hub may have trouble if they’re looking to use AI during the creative process. The game publisher and distributor says that Steam will no longer tolerate products that were generated using copyright-infringing AI content. Since that’s a policy that could apply to most—if not all—of AI-generated content, it’s hard not to see this move as an outright AI ban by the platform.

Valve’s policy was initially spotted by a Redditor who claimed that the platform had rejected a game they submitted over copyright concerns. “I tried to release a game about a month ago, with a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated,” said the dev, revealing that they’d been met with an email stating that Valve could not ship their game unless they could “affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game.” Because the developer could not affirmatively prove this, their game was ultimately rejected.

When reached for comment by Gizmodo, Valve spokesperson Kaci Boyle clarified that the company was not trying to discourage the use of AI outright but that usage needed to comply with existing copyright law.

“The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show that a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music,” Boyle explained to Gizmodo. “In particular, there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models. It is the developer’s responsibility to make sure they have the appropriate rights to ship their game.”

[…]

Valve’s decision to nix any game that uses problematic AI content is obviously a defensive posture designed to protect against any unforeseen legal developments in the murky regulatory terrain that is the blossoming AI industry.

[…]

A legal fight is brewing over the role of copyrighted materials in the AI industry. Large language models—the high-tech algorithms that animate popular AI products like ChatGPT and DALL-E—have been trained with massive amounts of data from the web. As it turns out, a lot of that data is copyrighted material—stuff like works of art, books, essays, photographs, and videos. Multiple lawsuits have argued that AI companies like OpenAI and Midjourney are basically stealing and repackaging millions of people’s copyrighted works and then selling a product based on those works; those companies, in turn, have defended themselves, claiming that training an AI generator to spit out new text or imagery based on ingested data is the same thing as a human writing a novel after having been inspired by other books. Not everybody is buying this claim, leading to the growing refrain “AI is theft.”

Source: Valve All But Bans AI-Generated Content from Steam Games

So the problem really is that the law is not clear and Valve has decided to pre-empt the law by saying that they have a punitive vision of copyright law beforehand. That’s not so strange considering the stranglehold copyright law has in the West, which goes to show yet again: copyright law – allowing people to coast through on past work forever – is stifling innovation

Big Business Isn’t Happy With FTC’s ‘Click to Cancel’ Proposal – says people enjoy tortuous cancellations

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The Federal Trade Commission’s recent proposal to require that companies offer customers easy one-click options to cancel subscriptions might seem like a no-brainer, something unequivocally good for consumers. Not according to the companies it would affect, though. In their view, the introduction of simple unsubscribe buttons could lead to a wave of accidental cancellations by dumb customers. Best, they say, to let big businesses protect customers from themselves and make it a torment to stop your service

Those were some of the points shared by groups representing major publishers and advertisers during the FTC’s recent public comment period ending in June. Consumers, according to the Wall Street Journal, generally appeared eager for the new proposals which supporters say could make a dent in tricky, bordering-on deceptive anti-cancellation tactics deployed by cable companies, entertainment sites, gyms, and other businesses who game out ways to make it as difficult as possible to quickly quit a subscription

[…]

Source: Big Business Isn’t Happy With FTC’s ‘Click to Cancel’ Proposal

Film companies demand names of Reddit users who discussed piracy in 201

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Reddit is fighting another attempt by film companies to unmask anonymous Reddit users who discussed piracy.

The same companies lost a previous, similar motion to identify Reddit users who wrote comments in piracy-related threads. Reddit avoided revealing the identities of eight users by arguing that the First Amendment protected their right to anonymous speech.

Reddit is seeking a similar outcome in the new case, in which the film companies’ subpoena to Reddit sought “Basic account information including IP address registration and logs from 1/1/2016 to present, name, email address and other account registration information” for six users who wrote comments on Reddit threads in 2011 and 2018.

[…]

Film companies, including Bodyguard Productions and Millennium, are behind both lawsuits. In the first case, they sued Internet provider RCN for allegedly ignoring piracy on its broadband network. They sued Grande in the second case. Both RCN and Grande are owned by Astound Broadband.

Reddit is a non-party in both copyright infringement cases filed against the Astound-owned ISPs, but was served with subpoenas demanding information on Reddit users. When Reddit refused to provide all the requested information in both cases, the film companies filed motions to compel Reddit to respond to the subpoenas in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

[…]

Reddit’s response to the latest motion to compel, which was previously reported by TorrentFreak today, said the film companies “have already obtained from Grande identifying information for 118 of Grande’s ‘top 125 pirating IP addresses.’ That concession dooms the Motion; Plaintiffs cannot possibly establish that unmasking these six Reddit users is the only way for Plaintiffs to generate evidence necessary for their claims when they have already succeeded in pursuing an alternative and better way.”

The evidence obtained directly from Grande is “far better than what they could obtain from Reddit,” Reddit said, adding that plaintiffs can subpoena the 118 subscribers that are known to have engaged in copyright infringement instead.

Reddit said the six users whose identities are being sought “posted generally about using Grande to torrent. These six Reddit users responded to two threads in a subreddit for the city of Austin, Texas. The majority of the users posted over 12 years ago while the remaining two posted five years ago.”
[…]

Source: Film companies demand names of Reddit users who discussed piracy in 2011 | Ars Technica

AI Tool Decodes Brain Cancer’s Genome During Surgery

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Scientists have designed an AI tool that can rapidly decode a brain tumor’s DNA to determine its molecular identity during surgery — critical information that under the current approach can take a few days and up to a few weeks.

Knowing a tumor’s molecular type enables neurosurgeons to make decisions such as how much brain tissue to remove and whether to place tumor-killing drugs directly into the brain — while the patient is still on the operating table.

[…]

A report on the work, led by Harvard Medical School researchers, is published July 7 in the journal Med.

Accurate molecular diagnosis — which details DNA alterations in a cell — during surgery can help a neurosurgeon decide how much brain tissue to remove. Removing too much when the tumor is less aggressive can affect a patient’s neurologic and cognitive function. Likewise, removing too little when the tumor is highly aggressive may leave behind malignant tissue that can grow and spread quickly.

[…]

Knowing a tumor’s molecular identity during surgery is also valuable because certain tumors benefit from on-the-spot treatment with drug-coated wafers placed directly into the brain at the time of the operation, Yu said.

[…]

The tool, called CHARM (Cryosection Histopathology Assessment and Review Machine), is freely available to other researchers. It still has to be clinically validated through testing in real-world settings and cleared by the FDA before deployment in hospitals, the research team said.

[…]

CHARM was developed using 2,334 brain tumor samples from 1,524 people with glioma from three different patient populations. When tested on a never-before-seen set of brain samples, the tool distinguished tumors with specific molecular mutations at 93 percent accuracy and successfully classified three major types of gliomas with distinct molecular features that carry different prognoses and respond differently to treatments.

Going a step further, the tool successfully captured visual characteristics of the tissue surrounding the malignant cells. It was capable of spotting telltale areas with greater cellular density and more cell death within samples, both of which signal more aggressive glioma types.

The tool was also able to pinpoint clinically important molecular alterations in a subset of low-grade gliomas, a subtype of glioma that is less aggressive and therefore less likely to invade surrounding tissue. Each of these changes also signals different propensity for growth, spread, and treatment response.

The tool further connected the appearance of the cells — the shape of their nuclei, the presence of edema around the cells — with the molecular profile of the tumor. This means that the algorithm can pinpoint how a cell’s appearance relates to the molecular type of a tumor.

[…]

Source: AI Tool Decodes Brain Cancer’s Genome During Surgery | Harvard Medical School

Sacramento Sheriff is sharing license plate reader data with anti-abortion states, records show

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In 2015, Democratic Elk Grove Assemblyman Jim Cooper voted for Senate Bill 34, which restricted law enforcement from sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data with out-of-state authorities. In 2023, now-Sacramento County Sheriff Cooper appears to be doing just that.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) a digital rights group, has sent Cooper a letter requesting that the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office cease sharing ALPR data with out-of-state agencies that could use it to prosecute someone for seeking an abortion.

According to documents that the Sheriff’s Office provided EFF through a public records request, it has shared license plate reader data with law enforcement agencies in states that have passed laws banning abortion, including Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas.

[…]

Schwartz said that a sheriff in Texas, Idaho or any other state with an abortion ban on the books could use that data to track people’s movements around California, knowing where they live, where they work and where they seek reproductive medical care, including abortions.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office isn’t the only one sharing that data; in May, EFF released a report showing that 71 law enforcement agencies in 22 California counties — including Sacramento County — were sharing such data. The practice is in violation of a 2015 law that states “a (California law enforcement) agency shall not sell, share, or transfer ALPR information, except to another (California law enforcement) agency, and only as otherwise permitted by law.”

[…]

 

Source: Sacramento Sheriff is sharing license plate reader data with anti-abortion states, records show

Comedian, novelists sue OpenAI for reading books. Maybe we should sue people for reading them as well?

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Award-winning novelists Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, and, separately comedian Sarah Silverman and novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, have sued OpenAI and accused the startup of training ChatGPT on their books without consent, violating copyright laws.

The lawsuits, both filed in the Northern District Court of San Francisco, say ChatGPT generates accurate summaries of their books and highlighted this as evidence for the software being trained on their work.

[…]

In the second suit, Silverman et al [PDF], make similar claims.

[…]

OpenAI trains its large language models by scraping text from the internet, and although it hasn’t revealed exactly what resources it has swallowed up, the startup has admitted to training its systems on hundreds of thousands of books protected by copyright, and stored on websites like Sci-Hub or Bibliotik.

[…]

Source: Comedian, novelists sue OpenAI for scraping books • The Register

The problem is though, that people read books too. And they can (and do) create accurate summaries from them. What is worse, is that the creativity shown by people can be shown to be influenced by the books, art, dance, etc that they have ingested. So maybe people should be banned from reading books as well under copyright?

GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers, can be fooled very easily

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GPT detectors frequently misclassify non-native English writing as AI generated, raising concerns about fairness and robustness. Addressing the biases in these detectors is crucial to prevent the marginalization of non-native English speakers in evaluative and educational settings and to create a more equitable digital landscape.

[…]

if AI-generated content can easily evade detection while human text is frequently misclassified, how effective are these detectors truly?
Our findings emphasize the need for increased focus on the fairness and robustness of GPT detectors, as overlooking their biases may lead to unintended consequences, such as the marginalization of non-native speakers in evaluative or educational settings
[…]
GPT detectors exhibit significant bias against non-native English authors, as demonstrated by their high misclassification of TOEFL essays written by non-native speakers […] While the detectors accurately classified the US student essays, they incorrectly labeled more than half of the TOEFL essays as “AI-generated” (average false-positive rate: 61.3%). All detectors unanimously identified 19.8% of the human-written TOEFL essays as AI authored, and at least one detector flagged 97.8% of TOEFL essays as AI generated.
[…]
On the other hand, we found that current GPT detectors are not as adept at catching AI plagiarism as one might assume. As a proof-of-concept, we asked ChatGPT to generate responses for the 2022–2023 US Common App college admission essay prompts. Initially, detectors were effective in spotting these AI-generated essays. However, upon prompting ChatGPT to self-edit its text with more literary language (prompt: “Elevate the provided text by employing literary language”), detection rates plummeted to near zero
[…]

Source: GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers: Patterns

Phone cam array – An open-source, modular photogrammetry system made of Android phones

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Photogrammetry is a 3D reconstruction technique using photographs of the target from multiple angles. Taking pictures around a static object with a single camera can yield high-quality models, but if the subject moves between images, 3D reconstruction might fail. One way to mitigate this is to use multiple cameras.
This project aimed to develop a tool for fast and precise wound documentation for clinical forensic medicine.
This paper describes a simple, low-cost modular system, where smartphones of different manufacturers are used as networked cameras. Exposure is initiated at the same time in all the phones with a simple circuit emulating a headset button press.
A proof-of-concept device was built, where four phones (Huawei nova 8i (2 pcs), Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, Oukitel K4000 Pro) were attached to a curved, 3D-printed, handheld frame.
The average delay of image capture was 636 ms between the quickest and the slowest phones. When compared to the single-camera approach, the use of different cameras did not reduce the quality of the 3D model. The phone cam array was less susceptible to movement artefacts caused by breathing. Wound assessment was possible based on the 3D models created with this device.
[…]
Source file repository https://doi.org/10.17632/2nhfs99zcy.1

[…]

In this paper, a simple, but modular 3D-printed frame is described. The phones are attached to a handheld, curved frame, which ensures that all the cameras would focus on the same point. The pieces are joined by heat-set inserts and metric screws. The 3D-printed phone mounts are attached with cable ties.

  • A simple modular system of Android phones to capture images concurrently for photogrammetry reconstruction.
  • The phones do not need to be the same model or make.
  • The phones are attached to a 3D-printed handheld frame.
  • The system allows the 3D reconstruction of living, moving subjects.

[…]

The core of the system is a simple controller module, which connects to the phone with a 3.5 mm jack plug and emulates the press of volume + of a headset, to release the camera shutter. The design is based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) accessory specification

[…]

Source: Phone cam array – An open-source, modular photogrammetry system made of Android phones – HardwareX

Project comes with STL and STEP files as well as materials list

Elizabeth Holmes’ Prison Sentence Quietly Reduced by Two Years, as is Theranos CEO’s

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Disgraced Theranos co-founder Elizabeth Holmes’ prison sentence has been reduced by two years, according to the Bureau of Prisons records. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison for defrauding investors by claiming her blood-testing company provided quick and reliable results but she was found to have lied about the reliability of those tests.

Holmes surrendered to the Bureau of Prisons in California on May 30 to serve out her sentence at a minimum-security all-female federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas. Less than two months after she reported to prison, her sentence was quietly changed, with her new release date scheduled for December 29, 2032, the Bureau’s site says. The Bureau has not provided additional information for why Holmes’ projected release date was shortened, but its site says an inmate’s good behavior, substance abuse program completion, and time credits they receive for activities and programs they’ve completed can result in a lessened sentence.

Only last month, Theranos’ former president and chief operating officer Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani’s 13-year sentence was likewise reduced by two years, making his new projected release date April 11, 2034.

[…]

Holmes’s reduced sentence appears to be the latest in a string of leniencies granted to her by the court system including being allowed to remain at her California estate while she appealed her prison sentence, rather than waiting behind bars.

Theranos collapsed in 2018 after an explosive investigative piece by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Holmes had made false claims that the blood-testing technology was accurate.

[…]

Source: Elizabeth Holmes’ Prison Sentence Quietly Reduced by Two Years

That this scumbag can be released at all is incredible.

Amazon claims it isn’t a “Very Large Online Platform” to evade EU rules

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Amazon doesn’t want to comply with Europe’s Digital Services Act, and to avoid the rules the company is arguing that it doesn’t meet the definition of a Very Large Online Platform under EU law. Amazon filed an appeal at the EU General Court to challenge the European Commission decision that Amazon meets the criteria and must comply with the new regulations.

“We agree with the EC’s objective and are committed to protecting customers from illegal products and content, but Amazon doesn’t fit this description of a ‘Very Large Online Platform’ (VLOP) under the DSA and therefore should not be designated as such,” Amazon said in a statement provided to Ars today.

[…]

Amazon argued that the new law is supposed to “address systemic risks posed by very large companies with advertising as their primary revenue and that distribute speech and information,” and not businesses that are primarily retail-based. “The vast majority of our revenue comes from our retail business,” Amazon said.

Amazon claims to be “unfairly singled out”

Amazon also claims it’s unfair that some retailers with larger businesses in individual countries weren’t on the list of 19 companies that must comply with the Digital Services Act. The rules only designate platforms with over 45 million active users in the EU as of February 17.

Amazon said it is “not the largest retailer in any of the EU countries where we operate, and none of these largest retailers in each European country has been designated as a VLOP. If the VLOP designation were to be applied to Amazon and not to other large retailers across the EU, Amazon would be unfairly singled out and forced to meet onerous administrative obligations that don’t benefit EU consumers.”

Those other companies Amazon referred to include Poland’s Allegro or the Dutch Bol.com, according to a Bloomberg report. Neither of those platforms appears to have at least 45 million active users.

[…]

In April, Europe announced its designation of 19 large online platforms, which are mostly US-based companies. Five are run by Google, specifically YouTube, Google Search, the Google Play app and digital media store, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram are on the list, as are Amazon’s online store, Apple’s App Store, Microsoft’s Bing search engine, TikTok, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

Listed platforms also include Alibaba AliExpress, Booking.com, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snapchat. The other platform is German online retailer Zalando, which was the first company to sue the EC in an attempt to get removed from the list.

Companies have until August 25 to comply and could face fines of up to 6 percent of their annual revenue if they don’t. Companies will have to submit annual risk assessments and risk mitigation plans that are subject to independent audits and oversight by the European Commission.

“Platforms will have to identify, analyze and mitigate a wide array of systemic risks ranging from how illegal content and disinformation can be amplified on their services, to the impact on the freedom of expression and media freedom,” the EC said in April. “Similarly, specific risks around gender-based violence online and the protection of minors online and their mental health must be assessed and mitigated.” One new rule bans advertisements that target users based on sensitive data such as ethnic origin, political opinions, or sexual orientation.

The EC also said that users must be given “clear information on why they are recommended certain information and will have the right to opt-out from recommendation systems based on profiling.” Users must have the ability “to report illegal content easily and platforms have to process such reports diligently.” Amazon and the other platforms must also “provide an easily understandable, plain-language summary of their terms and conditions, in the languages of the Member States where they operate.”

[…]

 

Source: Amazon claims it isn’t a “Very Large Online Platform” to evade EU rules | Ars Technica

Poor poor Amazon – the spy company monopolist marketplace that rips off the retailers in it’s own market!

Mom pleads guilty to abortion after Meta gives DMs to cops – 2023 and these are the witch hunts we see in the land of the free, USA

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A Nebraska mother pleaded guilty on Friday to giving her 17-year-old daughter pills for an abortion last year and to helping her dispose of the 29-week-old fetus.

Jessica Burgess, 42, in a plea agreement admitted providing an abortion to her daughter Celeste after 20 weeks of pregnancy, false reporting, and tampering with human remains, according to the Associated Press. Two of the charges are felonies, one is a misdemeanor.

Burgess last August pleaded not guilty to five criminal charges. As part of the plea agreement, the State of Nebraska dropped two of them: concealing the death of a person, and abortion by a person who is not a licensed physician. She is scheduled to be sentenced in September.

The Burgess case began in April 2022 when a Norfolk Police detective began investigating “concerns” – a tip – that the daughter had a stillbirth and had enlisted the help of her mother to dispose of the fetus.

Norfolk Police detective Ben McBride in an affidavit [PDF] describes obtaining the medical records of the women, interviewing them, and obtaining a search warrant to gain access to the women’s Meta/Facebook account data, based on knowledge of a relevant Facebook Messenger discussion.

The messages obtained discuss taking the pills and plans to burn the fetus.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Last August, after the charges were first filed, Meta issued a statement saying that it had responded to valid legal warrants related to the “alleged illegal burning and burial of a stillborn infant.”

“The warrants did not mention abortion at all,” the company said.

[…]

Source: Mom pleads guilty to abortion after Meta gives DMs to cops • The Register

An Alarming 87 Percent Of Retro Games Are Being Lost To Time

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[…] The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) partnered with the Software Preservation Network, an organization intent on advancing software preservation through collective action, to release a report on the disappearance of classic video games. “Classic” in this case has been defined as all games released before 2010, which the VGHF noted is the “year when digital game distribution started to take off.”

The status of physical video games

In the study, the two groups found that 87 percent of these classic games are not in release and considered critically endangered due to their widespread unavailability.

[…]

“For accessing nearly 9 in 10 classic games, there are few options: Seek out and maintain vintage collectible games and hardware, travel across the country to visit a library, or… piracy,” VGHF co-director Kelsey Lewin wrote.

[…]

the study claims that just 13 percent of game history is archived in libraries right now. And that’s part of the dilemma here. According to a March 2023 Ars Technica report, laws around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) largely prevent folks from making and distributing copies of any DRM-protected digital work. While the U.S. Copyright Office has issued exemptions to those rules so that libraries and researchers can archive digital material, video games are explicitly left out, which makes it nigh impossible for anyone to effectively study game history.

“Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it,” Lewin wrote. “And what if no library, not even the Library of Congress, could do any better—they could keep and digitize that VHS of Titanic, but you’d have to go all the way there to watch it.

[…]

Though not surprised, she was still alarmed by the “flimsy” ways in which games disappear, pointing to Antstream Arcade, which houses a plethora of games from the Commodore 64 to the Game Boy that could be lost to time should it close up shop. The Nintendo eShop is a more mainstream example.

“When the eShop shut down the availability of the Game Boy library, [the number of available Game Boy games] went from something like 11 percent to 4.5 percent,” Lewin said. “The company wiped out half of the availability of the library of Game Boy games just by shutting down the Nintendo eShop.

[…]

Lewin noted that although libraries are allowed to do a lot of things “by being libraries [and] preservation institutions,” the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has consistently lobbied against game preservation efforts such as copyright permissions and allowing the rental of digital video games.

“The ESA has basically opposed all of these new proposed exemptions,” Lewin said. “They’ve just been like, ‘No, that will hurt our bottom line,’ or, ‘That will hurt the industry’s bottom line.’ The ESA also says the industry is doing plenty to keep classic games in release, pointing to this thriving reissue market. And that’s true; there is a thriving reissue market. It’s just that it only covers 13 percent of video games, and that’s not likely to get any better any time soon.”

Read More: As More Games Disappear Forever, John Carmack Has Some Great Advice About Preservation

The study will be used in a 2024 copyright hearing to ask for exemptions for games. Lewin said she’s hopeful that progress will be made, suggesting that, should the hearing go well, games could be available on digital library apps like Libby. You can read the full 50-page study on the open repository Zenodo.

Source: An Alarming 87 Percent Of Retro Games Are Being Lost To Time

France Allows Police to Remotely Turn On GPS, Camera, Audio on Phones

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Amidst ongoing protests in France, the country has just passed a new bill that will allow police to remotely access suspects’ cameras, microphones, and GPS on cell phones and other devices.

As reported by Le Monde, the bill has been criticized by the French people as a “snoopers” charter that allows police unfettered access to the location of its citizens. Moreover, police can activate cameras and microphones to take video and audio recordings of suspects. The bill will reportedly only apply to suspects in crimes that are punishable by a minimum of five years in jail

[…]

French politicians added an amendment that orders judge approval for any surveillance conducted under the scope of the bill and limits the duration of surveillance to six months

[…]

In 2021, The New York Times reported that the French Parliament passed a bill that would expand the French police force’s ability to monitor civilians using drones. French President Emmanuel Macron argued at the time that the bill was meant to protect police officers from increasingly violent protestors.

[…]

 

Source: France Passes Bill Allowing Police to Remotely Access Phones

Amazon’s iRobot Roomba acquisition under formal EU investigation

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European Union regulators have opened an official investigation into Amazon’s proposed $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot, the company behind the popular Roomba lineup of robot vacuum cleaners.

In a press release, the European Commission said it’s concerned that “the transaction would allow Amazon to restrict competition in the market for robot vacuum cleaners (‘RVCs’) and to strengthen its position as online marketplace provider.” The European Commission is also looking at how getting access to iRobot users’ data may give Amazon an advantage “in the market for online marketplace services to third-party sellers (and related advertising services) and / or other data-related markets.”

[…]

Source: Amazon’s iRobot Roomba acquisition under formal EU investigation

Do you really want Amazon to know the layout of the interior of your home?

People Are Using Forged Court Orders To Disappear Content They Don’t Like using DMCA

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Copyright is still high on the list of censorial weapons. When you live in (or target) a country that protects free speech rights and offers intermediaries immunity via Section 230, you quickly surmise there’s a soft target lying between the First Amendment and the CDA.

That soft target is the DMCA. Thanks to plenty of lived-in experience, services serving millions or billions of users have decided it’s far easier to cater to (supposed) copyright holders than protect their other millions (or billions!) of users from abusive DMCA takedown demands.

There’s no immunity when it comes to the DMCA. There’s only the hope that US courts (should they be actually involved) will view good faith efforts to remove infringing content as acceptable preventative efforts.

But terrible people who neither respect the First Amendment nor the Communications Decency Act have found exploitable loopholes to disappear content they don’t like. And it’s always the worst people doing this. An entire cottage industry of “reputation management” firms has calcified into a so-called business model that views anything as acceptable until a court starts handing down sanctions.

“Cursory review” is the name of the game. Bullshit is fed to DMCA inboxes in hopes the people overseeing millions (or billions!) of pieces of uploaded content won’t spend too much time vetting takedown requests. When the initial takedown requests fail, bullshit artists (some of them hired!) decide to exploit the public sector.

Bogus litigation involving nonexistent defendants gives bad actors the legal paperwork they need to silence their critics. Bullshit default judgments are handed to bad faith plaintiffs by judges who can’t be bothered to do anything other than scan the docket to ensure at least some filings exist.

At the bottom of this miserable rung are the people who can’t even exploit these massively exploitable holes effectively. The bottom dwellers do what’s absolutely illegal, rather than just legally questionable. They forge court orders to demand takedowns of content they don’t like.

Eugene Volokh of the titular Volokh Conspiracy has plenty of experience with every variety of abusive takedown action listed above. In fact, he’s published an entire paper about these multiple levels of bullshit in the Utah Law Review.

Ironically, it’s that very paper that’s triggered the latest round of bogus takedown demands.

Yesterday, I saw that someone tried to use a different scheme, which I briefly mentioned in the article (pp. 300-01), to try to deindex the Utah Law Review version of my article: They sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice to Google claiming that they owned the copyright in my article, and that the Utah Law Review version was an unauthorized copy of the version that I had posted on my own site:

Welcome to the party, “I Liam.”

But who do you represent? Volokh has some idea(s).

The submitter, therefore, asked Google to “deindex” that page—remove it from Google’s indexes, so that people searching for “mergeworthrx” or “stephen cichy” or “anthony minnuto” (another name mentioned on the page) wouldn’t see it.

So what prompted Google to remove this content that “I Liam” wished to disappear on behalf of his benefactors (presumably “mergeworthrx,” “stephen cichy,” and “anthony minnuto”)?

Well, it was a court order — one that was faked by whoever “I Liam” is:

Except there was no court order. Case No. 13-13548 CA was a completely different case. Celia Ampel, a reporter for the South Florida Daily Business Review, was never sued by MergeworthRX. The file submitted to Google was a forgery.

And definitely not an anomaly:

It was one of over 90 documents submitted to Google (and to other hosting platforms) that I believe to be forgeries. 

[…]

Source: Terrible People Are Still Using Forged Court Orders To Disappear Content They Don’t Like | Techdirt

The writer continues to say it’s terrible that there are terrible people and you can’t blame Google, when there is definitely a case to be made that Google can indeed do more due diligence. When the DMCA came into effect, people noted that this was ripe for the raping and so it happened. Alternatives were suggested but discarded. DMCA itself is very very poor law and should be revoked as it protects something we shouldn’t be protecting in the first place and does so in a way that allows people to randomly take down content with almost no recourse.

JP Morgan “accidentally” deletes 47 million comms records related to Chase bank

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JP Morgan has been fined $4 million by America’s securities watchdog, the SEC, for deleting millions of email records dating from 2018 relating to its Chase Bank subsidiary.

The financial services giant apparently deleted somewhere in the region of 47 million electronic communications records from about 8,700 electronic mailboxes covering the period January 1 through to April 23, 2018.

Many of these, it turns out, were business records that were required to be retained under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the SEC said in a filing [PDF] detailing its findings.

Worse still, the screwup meant that it couldn’t produce evidence that that the SEC and others subpoenaed in their investigations. “In at least 12 civil securities-related regulatory investigations, eight of which were conducted by the Commission staff, JPMorgan received subpoenas and document requests for communications which could not be retrieved or produced because they had been deleted permanently,” the SEC says.

What went wrong?

The trouble for JP Morgan can be traced to a project where the company aimed to delete from its systems any older communications and documents that were no longer required to be retained.

According to the SEC’s summary, the project experienced “glitches,” with those documents identified for deletion failing to be deleted under the processes implemented by JPMorgan.

[…]

Source: JP Morgan accidentally deletes 47 million comms records • The Register

Animation Shows What the World Would Look Like If You Could See Carbon Dioxide Emissions

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The team at NASA made three animations, all showing the carbon dioxide levels throughout the year 2021. Each one shows four major contributors: fossil fuels, burning biomass, land ecosystems, and the oceans. In the view showing North and South America, we can see the results of plants absorbing the gas via photosynthesis and then releasing it during winter months. There are intense contributions along the northeastern seaboard of the U.S. mainly by emissions from fossil fuels burning. There’s also a rise and fall of the gas over the Amazon rainforest. The team also interprets this as plants absorbing carbon during the day and then releasing it at night.

Carbon dioxide measurements over North and South America in 2021. NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio [NB: for the impatient, skip forward through the videos to see how fast this stuff is covering more and more of the planet]

The animations also show sources and sinks (where CO2 is absorbed) in Asia and show an incredible amount of fossil fuel emissions over China. In other parts of the world, such as Australia, the absorption of this gas is much higher, with lower emissions due to lower populations.

[…]

You can watch additional videos here.

[…]

This greenhouse-induced climate change is a complex process to study, but it’s clear that carbon dioxide is part of it. There are two sources of it here on Earth: natural and human-caused. Natural CO2 sources provide most of this gas released into the atmosphere. These include oceans, animal and plant respiration, decomposition of organic matter, forest fires, and volcanic eruptions. Scientists know of some naturally occurring CO2 deposits in Earth’s crust that could also serve as CO2 sources. There are also “sinks”, where the gas gets trapped for some period of time. The oceans, (particularly the southern ocean), soil, and forests all “suck it in”, along with other plants. Those same sinks can release their stores of this gas.

Human-caused (or “anthropogenic”) sources include power generation, chemical production, agricultural practices, and transportation. Note that most of these involve fossil fuel burning. Fossil fuels are natural gas, coal, and oil.

How CO2 Cycles Over Time

The carbon cycle, which helps trace carbon dioxide on Earth. Courtesy: NOAA
The carbon cycle, which helps trace carbon dioxide on Earth. Courtesy: NOAA

So, we know that carbon dioxide goes through a natural “cycle” where it is exchanged in the air, ground, oceans, plants, humans, and animals. Throughout most of history, this cycle kept the seasonal average of CO2 in the atmosphere around an estimated 280 parts per million (ppm). In modern times, fossil fuel burning and other human activities added more CO2 to the cycle and changed the amount of it in the atmosphere. That pace has accelerated to the point where the levels are up by 50% in less than 200 years. Today the amount of CO2 is around 441 ppm and it continues to rise as we pump more of the gas into the air. Climatologists predict that as it rises, the average global temperature will continue to rise along with it.

If we look at average global temperatures since historical measurements began (when we were pumping less CO2 into the air), Earth’s temperature has risen about 0.08 C (0.14 F) each decade. Natural variability plays some role, but the addition of more carbon dioxide plays an increasing role. Over time, heating has added up to a 2-degree rise over more than a century. It tracks with the increasing amounts of this gas in our air. Two degrees is a lot; even one degree is enough to cause significant effects. To give you an idea, in the distant past, when global averages dropped by a degree or two, Earth suffered what’s called the Little Ice Age.

Warming Drives Change

A chart showing how global temperatures changed from 1880 to 2020. Courtesy MET Office Hadley Centre/Climactic Research Unit.
A chart showing how global temperatures changed from 1880 to 2020. Courtesy MET Office Hadley Centre/Climactic Research Unit.

It may not sound like much, but two degrees is enough to drive change in our weather patterns, water cycles, and other environmental processes. That gradual warming is why experts often refer to “global warming”. It’s not that everywhere gets hot at once. It means that the average annual air temperature is rising. To give you an idea, the year 2022 was the sixth warmest year since people began keeping global records in 1880.

Maps and animations of CO2 sources, sinks, and cycles like the ones from NASA satellite data show in stark detail the cycle of this particular gas. The idea is to help people understand visually and intellectually what changes our atmosphere experiences over time.

Source: Mind-Blowing Animation Shows What the World Would Look Like If You Could See Carbon Dioxide Emissions – Universe Today

How Hardware Testing Got Plugged Into A Continuous Integration Framework

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The concept of Continuous Integration (CI) is a powerful tool in software development, and it’s not every day we get a look at how someone integrated automated hardware testing into their system. [Michael Orenstein] brought to our attention the Hardware CI Arena, a framework for doing exactly that across a variety of host OSes and microcontroller architectures.

[…]

The Hardware CI Arena (GitHub repository) was created to allow automated testing to be done across a variety of common OS and hardware configurations. It does this by allowing software-controlled interactions to a bank of actual, physical hardware options. It’s purpose-built for a specific need, but the level of detail and frank discussion of the issues involved is an interesting look at what it took to get this kind of thing up and running.

The value of automatic hardware testing with custom rigs is familiar ground to anyone who develops hardware, but tying that idea into a testing and CI framework for a software product expands the idea in a useful way. When it comes to identifying problems, earlier is always better.

Source: How Hardware Testing Got Plugged Into A Continuous Integration Framework | Hackaday

$6.3b US firm Telesign breached GDPR, reputation-scoring half of the population of the planet with mobiles

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A US-based fraud prevention company is in hot water over allegations it not only collected data from millions of EU citizens and processed it using automated tools without their knowledge, but that it did so in the United States, all in violation of the EU’s data protection rules.

The complaint was filed by Austrian privacy advocacy group noyb, helmed by lawyer Max Schrems, and it doesn’t pull any punches in its claims that TeleSign, through its former Belgian parent company BICS, secretly collected data on cellphone users around the world.

That data, noyb alleges, was fed into an automated system that generates “reputation scores” that TeleSign sells to its customers, which includes TikTok, Salesforce, Microsoft and AWS, among others, for verifying the identity of a person behind a phone number and preventing fraud.

BICS, which acquired TeleSign in 2017, describes itself as “a global provider of international wholesale connectivity and interoperability services,” in essence operating as an interchange for various national cellular networks. Per noyb, BICS operates in more than 200 countries around the world and “gets detailed information (e.g. the regularity of completed calls, call duration, long-term inactivity, range activity, or successful incoming traffic) [on] about half of the worldwide mobile phone users.”

That data is regularly shared with TeleSign, noyb alleges, without any notification to the customers whose data is being collected and used.

[…]

In its complaint, an auto-translated English version of which was reviewed by The Register, noyb alleges that TeleSign is in violation of the GDPR’s provisions that ban use of automated profiling tools, as well as rules that require affirmative consent be given to process EU citizen’s data.

[…]

When BICS acquired TeleSign in 2017, it began to fall under the partial control of BICS’ parent company, Belgian telecom giant Proximus. Proximus held a partial stake in BICS, which Proximus spun off from its own operations in 1997.

In 2021, Proximus bought out BICS’ other shareholders, making it the sole owner of both the telecom interchange and TeleSign.

With that in mind, noyb is also leveling charges against Proximus and BICS. In its complaint, noyb said Proximus was asked by EU citizens from various countries to provide records of the data TeleSign processed, as is their right under Article 15 of the GDPR.

The complainants weren’t given the information they requested, says noyb, and claims what was handed over was simply a template copy of the EU’s standard contractual clause (SCC), which has been used by businesses transmitting data between the EU and US while the pair try to work out data transfer rules that Schrems won’t get struck down in court.

[…]

Noyb is seeking cessation of all data transfers from BICS to TeleSign, processing of said data, and is requesting deletion of all unlawfully transmitted data. It’s also asking for Belgian data protection authorities to fine Proximus, which noyb said could reach as high as €236 million ($257 million) – a mere 4 percent of Proximus’s global turnover.

[…]

Source: US firm ‘breached GDPR’ by reputation-scoring EU citizens • The Register

This firm is absolutely massive, yet it’s a smaller part of BICS and chances are that you’ve never ever heard of either of them!

Watch AI Trump Vs AI Biden In A Deranged Endless Live Debate

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[…]

someone’s gone ahead and locked both President Biden and former president / classified document holder Donald Trump into an infinite battle on Twitch that can only be described as “unhinged.”

Maybe that’s because the version of Biden we see on the trumporbiden2024 livestream isn’t Joe Biden per se, but clearly Dark Brandon, who is ready to go for the throat. Both AI versions of the politicians curse heavily at each other: at one point I heard Biden call Trump a limp dick and Trump retorted by telling him to go back to jacking off to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They both seem to be speaking to or reacting to the chat in some ways[…]

You can see the feed live below, though be warned, the audio may not be safe for work.

The things the AI will actually argue about seem to have a dream logic to them. I heard Biden exclaim that Trump didn’t know anything about Pokémon, so viewers shouldn’t trust him. Trump later informed Biden that he couldn’t possibly handle genetically modified catgirls, unlike him. “Believe me, nobody knows more about hentai than me,” Trump declared

Source: Watch AI Trump Vs AI Biden In A Deranged Endless Live Debate

Twitch stream is here

Virgin Galactic set to launch 1st commercial spaceflight on June 27

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Virgin Galactic’s first-ever commercial spaceflight will launch this month, if all goes according to plan.

The company, part of billionaire Richard Branson‘s Virgin Group, announced Thursday (June 15) that it has set a launch window of June 27 to June 30 for its debut operational flight, which it calls Galactic 01.

“Galactic 01, a scientific research mission, will carry three crew members from the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council of Italy to conduct microgravity research,” Virgin Galactic representatives said in a statement released Thursday afternoon.

“With scientific payloads on board, the spaceflight will showcase the value and power of the unique suborbital science lab that Virgin Galactic offers,” they added.

Source: Virgin Galactic set to launch 1st commercial spaceflight on June 27 | Space

The Grammys’ New Rules—AI Can’t Win Awards

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AI proved just how talented it can be at ripping off major artists after a computer-generated song based on The Weeknd and Drake went viral in April. Now, the Recording Academy—the body that votes on and manages the annual Grammy Awards—is setting new rules for AI’s role in the coveted accolade.

Speaking to Grammy.com, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason, Jr. laid out some confusing new standards for acceptable use of AI. Mason Jr. said that AI-assisted music can be submitted, but only the humans, who must have “contributed heavily,” will actually be awarded. For example, in a songwriting category like Song of the Year, a majority of a the nominated song would have to be written by a human creator, not a text-based generative AI like ChatGPT. Similarly, in performance categories like Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, only the human performer can be considered for the award. Sorry, Hatsune Miku.

[,,,]

Source: The Grammys’ New Rules—AI Can’t Win Awards

EU votes on battery reform – including being able to replace them in your mobile

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With 587 votes in favour, nine against and 20 abstentions, MEPs endorsed a deal reached with the Council to overhaul EU rules on batteries and waste batteries. The new law takes into account technological developments and future challenges in the sector and will cover the entire battery life cycle, from design to end-of-life.

Key measures foreseen by the regulation:

  • A compulsory carbon footprint declaration and label for electric vehicles (EV) batteries, light means of transport (LMT) batteries (e.g. for electric scooters and bikes), and rechargeable industrial batteries with a capacity above 2kWh;
  • Designing portable batteries in appliances in such a way that consumers can themselves easily remove and replace them;
  • A digital battery passport for LMT batteries, industrial batteries with a capacity above 2 kWh, and EV batteries;
  • A due diligence policy for all economic operators, except for SMEs;
  • Stricter waste collection targets: for portable batteries – 45% by 2023, 63% by 2027 and 73% by 2030; for LMT batteries – 51% by 2028 and 61% by 2031;
  • Minimum levels of materials recovered from waste batteries: lithium – 50% by 2027 and 80% by 2031; cobalt, copper, lead and nickel – 90% by 2027 and 95% by 2031;
  • Minimum levels of recycled content from manufacturing and consumer waste for use in new batteries: eight years after the entry into force of the regulation – 16% for cobalt, 85% for lead, 6% for lithium and 6% for nickel; 13 years after the entry into force: 26% for cobalt, 85% for lead, 12% for lithium and 15% for nickel.

[..]

Source: Making batteries more sustainable, more durable and better-performing | News | European Parliament

Great plan!